Adonais Summary

Adonais, Shelley’s lamentation on the death of John Keats, has been called the greatest pastoral elegy in English. It belongs to a tradition some twenty-three centuries old stemming from laments by ancient Greek poets Bion and Moschus. Similarly, and like John Milton’s “Lycidas,” Shelley’s elegy contemplates the larger tragic implications of the loss of a gifted poet, which subtracts from the world its most precious asset, genius.

The pastoral elegy is a highly conventional form. Typically, it includes reference to the deceased as a shepherd, the trappings of pagan mythology, the mourning of all nature, a procession of mourners, a contrast between revival in spring and the finality of death, and a praise of immortality. Shelley adapted these elements from tradition but jettisoned the conventional mechanics in a final strophe, an inspired Platonic exaltation. Throughout, the poet employed the elegant Spenserian stanza: two cross-rhymed quatrains in heroic meter with a final Alexandrine, using but three rhymes, ababbcbcc.

Shelley and Keats had met but were not close friends. Learning of his illness, Shelley invited Keats to live with him in Italy, but the arrangements were never completed. Shelley wrote Adonais four months later.

Shelley blamed hostile literary critics for the poet’s death and so enhanced a theme developed elsewhere in his own neglected verse, the mortifying effects on civilization of the common person’s contempt for genius. He depicts the poet as a shepherd...

(The entire section is 633 words.)

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